


Corruption

by kaeorin



Series: Loki's Lullabies [100]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Avenger Loki (Marvel), Avenger Reader (Marvel), Caretaking, Comfort, F/M, Fluff, Gen, Idiots in Love, Minor Injuries, Pranks and Practical Jokes, Pre-Relationship, Reader-Insert
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-04
Updated: 2020-07-04
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:55:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25061959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaeorin/pseuds/kaeorin
Summary: You’ve been spending a lot of time with Loki lately, but that’s only because he likes you to pull pranks with him. Right?
Relationships: Loki (Marvel)/Reader
Series: Loki's Lullabies [100]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1678240
Comments: 13
Kudos: 208





	Corruption

In all your time in the Tower, all your time on the team, maybe you’d never quite taken the time to think about the fact that you worked with gods. Compared to every last human being on the team, Thor and Loki were impossibly old and impossibly strong. But, on a day-to-day basis, they were just...Thor and Loki. You didn’t spend a lot of time marveling over the miracle of them. They were your teammates, your friends, and that was enough for you. Or...that _had_ to be enough for you.

It wasn’t like you were some immature teenager giggling and swooning over the two of them. But Loki was arguably nice to look at. So, sometimes, you looked. You did your absolute best never to let him catch you staring, but maybe, a little too often, your eyes drifted over his face. Maybe you studied his cheekbones, the dark places under his eyes, and you tried to imagine what it’d be like to touch him there. Maybe your brain plagued you a little too often with dreams about Loki, dreams that were just a little too _nice_ to be professional. But, as a general rule, you kept things under control. He was gorgeous and brilliant and lovely, but he was your teammate and he was definitely not someone who had any interest in humans.

And that was _fine_.

He seemed to like you well enough, for an Avenger, anyway. Slowly, he’d begun to seek you out and ask you to work with him to pull off one prank or another. And you were happy to help. He liked surprising people—shocking them a bit, but only ever just enough to make them laugh a little uncertainly. He never hurt anyone, and there were some people in the Tower he mostly left alone. On the rare occasion that he took something a little too far, you were more than happy to shoulder the bulk of the blame for it so that your teammates never felt like they needed to start looking at him suspiciously again. And Loki made it especially easy for you to duck your head and apologize profusely to whoever was upset: later, in private, he’d give you a beautiful, genuine smile that made your heart beat just a little too quickly.

It was a relatively quiet morning. You’d spent last night getting yourself caught up on paperwork and reports, which was a nice feeling for a change. That wasn’t something that you tried to do very often, lest the higher-ups start to expect that sort of thing from you all the time, but it was really nice not to have that looming over your head. You were sort of just wandering through the halls, not really looking for anything or anyone but not truly ready to park yourself on a sofa and do nothing all day, when, without warning, a hand shot out and yanked you around a corner.

Even with your training, the world was a dizzying blur for a few moments. Whoever it was, their fingers were clamped around your wrist like a shackle. They yanked you towards them with superhuman speed—and strength—and then slammed you against the wall. Your head hit first. Hard. You started to groan before you could stop yourself, and another hand pressed firmly to your mouth as though to keep you quiet. Pain was blooming in your head—throughout your scalp and behind your eyes—but anger and dread coiled tightly in your belly. If this was an attack, what was the purpose of it? Who was this? How could you alert the others?

Your captor pressed himself close to you, pinning you to the wall with his body even as he hissed at you to be silent. Your vision felt a little blurry—from banging your head, or from the sudden shot of adrenaline?—but, after blinking a few times, things cleared up enough for you to see who it was. 

Loki. Loki had manhandled you around the corner and thrown you into the wall and now he was very much inside your personal bubble and his hand was still over your mouth. You struggled against him a little, mostly just to make sure he understood that you did _not_ appreciate whatever it was that he was trying to do, and he cast an appraising look at you before peeking out around the corner.

Before either of you could say anything, you heard some familiar footsteps. Thor was on his way to his room. Loki’s whole body was tense and tight against you as he watched Thor fumble with his doorknob. You felt a familiar rush of energy—Loki had done something with his magic—and then Thor bellowed with surprise. Loki laughed and pulled himself away from you, keeping his hand around your wrist so he could pull you down the hallway.

You followed after him for a while, until you couldn’t hear Thor’s voice anymore, but then tried to yank your hand away. “Okay, that’s enough!” Your voice was a little sharper than you really meant for it to be, but your head was really hurting. You planted your feet solidly against the ground. Of course, Loki had already proven that he could pull you around like a ragdoll if he wanted, but you weren’t going to make it easy for him. “Stop!”

Thankfully, he did. He turned to look at you. His eyes were bright, twinkling with the same light that always lit his face after successfully pulling something off. But as he took in the sight of you and realized that you weren’t laughing with him, his face turned a little more serious. “Apologies. I didn’t mean to frighten you. Just, Thor was right behind you and I didn’t want you to distract him. There wasn’t time to explain.”

“You didn’t scare me.” Okay, not _entirely_ true, but at least that wasn’t why you were upset. With your free hand—the one that Loki wasn’t _holding_ —you reached up to touch the back of your head. It was hard to be sure, but maybe you felt the very beginnings of a bump. “I hit my head. Really hard, I think. It hurts.”

The last traces of amusement slid off of Loki’s face, and were replaced by something like guilt. He stepped a little closer, and only now did he let go of you. “I hurt you? Let me see.”

You didn’t fight particularly hard when he went to stand behind you and gingerly probed the back of your head, though you did flinch a little when he found the tender spot. “It’s fine. You just...rattled my brain a little. I’ll take a Tylenol or something and I’ll be fine.”

“Truly, I am sorry.” His voice was quiet. Obviously you couldn’t see his face, but it wasn’t hard for you to know how heavy his brows would be, how tight his lips would be. With all the time you spent together, you’d long since learned how to read his emotions in his face. He covered your maybe-bump with his cool fingers, and you tried not to sigh as that soothed some of the pain. “I forget...that you are mortal.” He sounded so thoughtful.

“Hey, it’s fine.” If you sounded a little weird, it was definitely just because you were getting a headache, and not because the feeling of his fingers against your scalp was throwing you off-balance. You laughed quietly. “I’m honored that maybe you’re not constantly thinking about how weak I am. Don’t worry about it.”

“Should I take you to the med bay?” He had yet to come around to look at your face, and he kept one hand heavy on your shoulder as though to keep you from turning to face him. “What if I’ve fractured something? Someone should have a look.”

You laughed again. “I’m _fine_. You didn’t crack my skull, I promise. And no concussions, either. It was just a bump. Give me a few hours and I’ll have forgotten all about it.”

That didn’t seem to sway him. “Memory loss is associated with brain injuries, is it not?”

You wanted to laugh again, but Loki’s solemn silence kept you in check. You did turn around, however, ducking easily under his hand. “I don’t have a brain injury. I’ve got a superficial little bump on my head and an Asgardian prince who feels very very bad about it. I’m fine. So what did you do to Thor?”

Maybe it wasn’t entirely fair of you to change the subject like that. You could see the struggle in his face: he wanted to keep worrying about you, but he also wanted to share his story with you. You tilted your head at him curiously and, at long last, he rolled his eyes. “It’s not that great. Yesterday, some sort of cartoon was on the television, and there was a bucket of water over a door...” He trailed off, but it wasn’t hard to guess where he was going with that train of thought.

“So you booby-trapped his door!” It hurt a little, to laugh very hard, but it was hard not to laugh when you imagined what that must have looked like. Thor, soaked with water, standing in his doorway and yelling for Loki? “I guess I know why we had to run.”

“Brother!” Thor’s footsteps preceded him as he came into the room. You had to bite the inside of your cheek to keep from smiling at the sight of him: soaked and dripping, and looking absolutely beside himself. By now it was practically second nature for you to step in between Loki and whoever was angriest at him, but Loki didn’t allow you to do that this time. Instead, he tugged you (gently) behind him and edged closer to Thor. “What were you thinking?!”

“It was an experiment. I wanted to see if Midgardian physics would play out the way they do in their cartoons.” You could practically hear the sly grin that began to curve onto Loki’s face. “And, in this case, they do. I cannot thank you enough for your participation in this endeavor.”

“You could have taken my head off! And what if I had been someone else?” Thor was trying to remain angry, but it was easy to tell that Loki had already more or less disarmed him with gratitude. When he looked past him to fix you with a steady glare, you could have sworn that he was trying to hold back a grin. “You really shouldn’t encourage this kind of behavior, you know.”

“Me?!” The idea of you having any kind of control over what Loki did or didn’t do was almost enough to make you laugh, but maybe your headache was growing stronger the longer you stood here. “I don’t—”

“I’d hoped that you’d be a settling influence on him, but it would appear that he’s only corrupted _you_.” He sounded for all the world as though he were disappointed, but there was enough laughter in his eyes to tell another story. Loki squeezed your hand. If that made you feel a little dizzy, well...you _did_ have a head injury, after all.

“Again, brother, I am forever in your debt for the role you’ve played in this experiment. But if you’ll excuse us...” Loki bowed ever-so-slightly at his brother, but then easily maneuvered around him to get past, and tugged you along with him. The two of you left Thor standing there and slipped into the kitchen, where Loki immediately went to the freezer to retrieve a tray of ice cubes. Before you could figure out what he was doing, he’d dumped them all into a large baggie, and then sat you down and pressed the ice to the back of your head.

The two of you sat in silence for a little while. You tried not to lean too firmly into his touch, but that ice was really something. He stood perfectly still, a sentinel keeping watch over the one he’d wounded. Sometimes, the two of you sat in silence like this. It was nice. Neither of you felt any particular urge to chatter just to fill a silence, and sometimes it was enough simply to be in the presence of one like that. You were beginning to realize that, out of everyone on the team and in the Tower, Loki was the one you spent the most time with. He seemed to know you best. And maybe it was silly or presumptuous to say that you knew him better than anyone else did—the team included his _brother_ , after all—but you were, at least, fairly confident in your ability to read his body language, which was a start.

Like, his free hand was resting on your shoulder. Here and there, he gave it a gentle squeeze, almost fondly. There was almost no way for him to know how fast your heart was beating and, even if he did know that, surely he’d never guess that _he_ was the cause.

But then...Loki always seemed to have a way of knowing things that should have been impossible for him to know. So it wasn’t terribly surprising when his voice sounded low and thick the next time he spoke: “I never intended to corrupt you.” The way he spoke left room for volumes: _...but I’ve gone and done it. ...but I hope you don’t blame me. ...but now that I have…_ The air felt electric.

He seemed a little surprised when you let your head tilt backwards, but he recovered nicely and moved the bag of ice so that it kept pressing against your bump even when the crown of your head rested against his body. This was a bizarre new angle from which to admire Loki’s beauty, and you allowed yourself a moment or two to do just that. It was only when his brows twitched a little, almost in question, that you swallowed hard and forced yourself to speak.

“You know...I don’t think I mind.”

He smirked down at you. And maybe it was a trick of the light, or possibly just wishful thinking, but you would have sworn that his eyes grew just a little bit darker.


End file.
